Agile practitioners have long known that agile teams work best when properly motivated. Motivation and focus are key. Steve gives a great description of how google works - and the key elements are motivation and focus. He says:

Google a peer-review oriented culture, and earning the respect of your peers means a lot there. More than it does at other places, I think. This is in part because it's just the way the culture works; it's something that was put in place early on and has managed to become habitual. It's also true because your peers are so damn smart that earning their respect is a huge deal. And it's true because your actual performance review is almost entirely based on your peer reviews, so it has an indirect financial impact on you.

and ...

every quarter, without fail, they have a long all-hands in which they show every single project that launched to everyone, and put up the names and faces of the teams (always small) who launched each one, and everyone applauds. Gives me a tingle just to think about it. Google takes launching very seriously, and I think that being recognized for launching something cool might be the strongest incentive across the
company. At least it feels that way to me.

What Google has done here is make launching and innovation a game. And it explains a lot.

Google has been great at releasing interesting web and desktop applications that really do things. They have a comprehensive, creative and compulsive internal review process that really pushes the developers to have something tight and well thought out before launch. Rapid launch is key to Googleculture survival, but slower launch is preferable to launching bad applications. (That's slower launch in Google time, not Microsoft time.)

Stevey's description of Google also helps explain why Google's products seem to launch at a greater rate than they get improved. Improvement isn't part of the game - unless its conspicuous improvement.

Stevey's Misunderstanding of Agile

Stevey doesn't seem to understand that Google's methodologies are agile. And that's funny. Stevey has looked at people who are bad managers and blamed their bad management on the coding style they prefer. Stevey rightly points out that many people poorly apply agile and are surprised with the results. The crusades are also a good example of the poor application of a set of principles.

But the fact is that many coders are bad managers. But, due to the militaristic design of most corporations, higher in the ranks means you are going to manage people. This is the Peter Principle and not necessarily an indictment against agile.

I can feel Stevey chafing now - he's still waiting for me to explain how Google's an agile shop. For help on this, I'll turn to this post by David Anderson.

David says that a process is agile if it:

enables companies to easily respond to change

delivers working code to market faster (than previously or with other methods)

delivers high quality working code

improves productivity

improves customer satisfaction

and provides an environment for a well motivated team with high job satisfaction

Clearly, the Google Culture has produced a Google Process that is a Google Agile variant. Stevey, would you say that Google is missing any of these elements?

Now I Agree With Stevey

Stevey was wrong about Google and whether or not it is Agile. Stevey is right in that people spend way too much time arguing about whether or not your shop is agile if you don't peer program or if you don't take specific metrics or if you create documentation. Stevey said:

One of the (many) problems with Bad Agile is that they condescendingly lump all non-Agile development practices together into two buckets: Waterfall and Cowboy. Waterfall is known to be bad; I hope we can just take that as an axiom today.

The issue here isn't whether or not Google is agile, it's that the Agile community is now focused on the definition of agile and not on creative problem solving.

Agile is supposed to be flexible and applied to organizations in ways that best meet the strengths of the members of the programming team and client. But we are handed Scrum or XP and a series of evangelical tomes that appear to give strict marching orders to organizations. The problem is, even following these edicts goes directly against elements of the Agile Manifesto.

Which is:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

There is nothing in the manifesto about peer programming or scrums or burn-down charts or anything.

But what do you really need to do this? You need to have understanding. Specifically you need to understand:

The goals and needs of your client

The abilities of your team

The culture of your client

The culture of your team

The limits of your budget

You want to deeply understand your client's goals and needs. This is what David Anderson calls "creating value". Google does this by rapidly releasing cool and innovative applications. It goes beyond their spec or their statements. There is always history there, dive into it. Why do they want this? How would they feel if they never had it? What are they afraid of? What are they hopeful for? What is their past | present | perceived future relationships with their stated need? Is there a need hiding under the stated need?

You want to understand the abilities and culture of your team. This goes beyond A level or B level coders. This is the understanding that people are organic. When you mix them up and put them in various situations they are more or even less than the sum of their parts. Your staff interacts in unique ways. They are not immune to petty bickering or group think. They are able to be inspired as a group and feed of each other's inspiration as well. They will band together or splinter apart. All independent of your programming methodology. You have to respond to them, not the other way around.

You need to understand the culture of your client. Not just the guy in charge of your contract. Not just your limited target audience. You need to understand the culture in which they operate. I'm sure that if I asked 16 year old males if they'd like a Mazerati, they'd say yes. But their culture (their parents) probably would put a stop to an actual purchase. Companies and government agencies have wildly different management styles. Their culture greatly impacts you by their decision making, funding policies, institutional biases, and internal politics. Your agile methodology needs to react more to these issues than to agile dogma. If your client demands a detailed design document, you give them one.

You need to understand the limits of your budget. Google appears to not have this problem. But everyone else on earth does. Stevey is right, Bad Agile is crazy bad at this. Bad practitioners of agile are plain bad at estimation and time management. To cover this up, they will focus on trading functionality for deadlines as the primary need to agile. It is certainly a major part of agile though.

In short, Agile doesn't exist in a vacuum. The principles of agile and the historic (good) applications of it are sound. But when you go to implement it, agile (which is agile) must bend to the individuals and organizations that are combining to require the project. In this bending, it must work to provide the most value, the highest quality product and soften even the most ridged existing processes to the inevitability of change.

Where do we go from here?

I'm going to try to post on this over the next few weeks. At the moment I'd say that Stevey is right, Agile is a religion. Like a religion it can be rigidly applied and used to enslave. Or it can be used as a set of principles by which one can lead a balanced and coherent life. Again, as human beings, we bring human tendencies into all our relationships. We've been taught that business is business. But it's not. Business is marriage. Business is family. Business is a sports team. Business is a sewing circle.

We can either listen to what the members of our extended business (co-workers, clients, etc.) are saying and learn to manage with emotional intelligence. Or we can hold the 25 Kent Beck books in the air and say "HOW DARE THEE ARGUE WITH KENT BECK!?"

I'll leave with this:

A man bought a new trail guide and went for a hike. Along his hike the trail abruptly ended, a storm had caused a landslide and the trail was gone. In its place was a 250 foot drop.

28 September 2006

To top it off, I blew a tire while driving and, in order to avoid traffic and parked cars, planted my car in a well trimmed and established Laurel Hedge. This really hurt my car. It took 4 hours to get the car out and placed at the body shop.

My good friend David Anderson provided me with much support and transport.

I find out today how much my birthday present will cost me. The deductible certainly.

23 September 2006

A few weeks back I posted about why I worked for community. My friend Karen posted a reply, indicating her distrust of community. I've been thinking about this the last few weeks and have a bit to say about that for my Saturday Morning Post.

We start with Hate, Pettiness and Cynicism

Hate

Years ago, when I was running the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, on the steering committee for the 1993 Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Parade March and Freedom Rally in Seattle June 28th (yes, that was the name), and generally highly visible - I received death threats from people who never carried them out (apparently). That year was one of turmoil all the way around in the US.

The death threats freaked my friend Ann out a lot. She wanted me to move or get a new phone number or something. But the threats weren't ominous, they were boring.

I told her "Hate is boring." And it is. Hate is a concept I just have no time for. I'd love to sit down and explore it with people, to deconstruct it. But it's just too boring.

Pettiness

That year as well, the Community of Endless Sexual Politics was living large in Seattle. For years, Seattle's Pride event was called the Gay Parade. Short, easy to fit on a shirt or a button. "But we're not Gay," Lesbians said. So they wanted to change it to the Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade. But then the Bi-Sexuals said, "Hey, you can't count us out, we're unique and this is an inclusive society!" So, it was discussed that the change should be made to the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Pride Parade. And then the transgendered community showed up.

And then quirks in the City of Seattle ordinances made it clear that a Parade was a willful act of celebration and thus not a political event. That meant that the steering committee would have to pay for police time and the interruption of traffic on the streets.

But a political event would not be so taxed. So the motion was made to change it to the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride March. "But it's always been a parade!" "Yeah, and it's not just a parade, we have a big rally at the end!" So ... it now became the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Parade, March and Freedom Rally."

By this time we had so many words it no longer mattered if we added some more. So, due to some amazingly bad leadership it ended up being the 1993 Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Parade, March and Freedom Rally in Seattle June 28th. I remember, because I made the logo that year. You try to fit all that on a pin!

No one liked my idea of calling it "Amblin' Homos."

In the march for inclusiveness, the community opened itself to pettiness. Pettiness is like an infection. The scope-creep from Gay Parade to the 1993 ... ... ... June 28th is appalling. I'm sure you would not be surprised to have heard that hours of mean-spirited debates that went on. Are bi-sexuals really gay? What is transgender? Let Lesbians have their own march, we've worked hard on this one!

Once we started arguing about that, it was easy for the process queens to show up and say "It needs the date, or no one will know when it is." "It needs to say Seattle in there somewhere, ours is special!" and so forth. The pettiness and unwillingness of the community to come together under a short name only led to the name getting longer and longer until we ended up with a 16 word monstrosity.

Cynicism

Nonetosurprising, this led to an immediate rise in cynicism. Because the name was designed by a massively dysfunctional committee, no one liked it.

When Harvey Fierstein stood in front of a huge banner of my logo in Seattle's Volunteer Park that year he said, "Welcome to the " [takes out a card] "1993 Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Parade, March and Freedom Rally in Seattle, June 28th!!!!!" He paused and said, "Wow, you guys really know how to name things up here!" Everyone in the audience, tens of thousands of them, laughed. They weren't responsible for the name. The steering committee members groaned.

I laughed.

One committee member says, "They have no idea how long it took to get to that name."

I replied, "If they did, they'd be laughing even harder."

He actually chuckled at that.

Another committee member, who has never said a word to me since I uttered the phrase "Amblin' Homos" three months earlier said, "You got that right."

So we had a steering committee that was now cynical about its own event because they had let hate and pettiness between groups of sexual minorities (their constituents) hijack a community process. In subsequent years, the Pride March in Seattle almost died - even though it was highly attended by spectators and marching groups alike. The steering committee was so cynical that they would gather and stall their own processes.

What We Can Learn From This

The Gay Parade was always fairly well attended in Seattle. But it really started to take off around 1992. There was a new militancy to the movement for recognition and acceptance by the sexual minority community. That militancy was encapsulated by four main individual groups (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender). The inward focus of these groups led to a lack of cohesion (at least initially) between the dominant Gay Male community and the others.

We see the same issues come up time and again with political groups, religions, races.

As I see it, in the end, we are all very insecure about who we are, what we have, how we've obtained self or goods, and what we perceive as threats. A threat is something that in some way may dissolve our individuality. The less secure we are, the more likely we are to fight to preserve our individuality by outlawing or threatening the actions of others. The less secure we are, the less like we are to form new communities with those whom we perceive as different.

This is not without reason, alleged communities are often fronts for people who do precisely wish to use the power of community (or at least the group) to control others. I have written previously on my views that the US Political Parties are power structures posing as communities.

So, how do we avoid these traps?

We adhere to a few rules that make good communities and community members.

One, realize that by definition we are the only arbiter of our individuality.

Two, we realize that power structures are inherently corrupt so even if we build one with the best of intentions we give it a sunset date.

Three, we realize that we are social animals and if we withdraw from social interactions we merely become animals.

Four, we realize that there is beauty on this earth and we only have so much time in life to enjoy it.

1. You Define You

There was a Visa ad a while back that showed a woman who was a kid, climbed trees, became a radical student in college, became a mom, became a business owner, became retired, became a radical retiree. You define you. Not your church, not your political party, not your job, not your parents, not your neighborhood, not your income.

The churches, political parties, professions, etc. that you find yourself associated with do not define you. You choose them based on your self-definition. They either extend your traits or help you learn ones you feel you might be lacking. If they do not, you are either an infiltrator, a wanna-be or self-loathing.

2. Nothing Lasts Forever

Without lifespans there is no urgency to either succeed or fail. Organizations of human creation are reflective of human foibles: greed, avarice, confusion. Organizations are almost always power-based. Power is like a bottle of Odwalla Orange Juice. It settles and you have to shake it up in order to enjoy it.

Over time, institutional entropy impacts all organizations. Their initial mandate - so clear at the beginning - begins to break down due to personalities in the organization, external catastrophes, changes in their vision or just plain complacency. This is the settling of power. As these things happen, some people in the organization concentrate their power and want to hold onto it. As a user of the system, this doesn't make the system useful. All the water is at the top, all the pulp at the bottom.

But for he who lives at the botton, he's got all the pulp.

Organizations need to be built with expiration dates or at least periodic times where the organization experiences a good "Shake Well."

3. I Miss You

When people are not around, we notice. Loneliness drives people to cabin fever.

We need institutions and community. We need them as much as we ever have. The Internet allows us tools to extend our communities and explore new ones. But we still need human contact.

In today's literal world, this often is thought of as putting ourselves in social situations. But people often talk about being in a roomful of people and still feeling lonely. That roomful of people is not a community for you, in that case. You need to feel welcomed. You need to feel active.

But, in order to feel active, we need to make ourselves open to others. That's scary to many because those others may try to control or change you. And being open means accepting that possibility. And that includes the possibility of rejection.

In the end, you define you, others may influence you, but you define you. When you accept that, other people become very important and utterly trivial. They become important when you and they combine to create. They become trivial when they try to harm.

The helpful boost you to amazing new heights (and you them), the malicious are merely boring.

4. Smell Flowers, Dammit

Good food, human contact,well written words, baseball, plays, unexpected turns of phrase - these are beautiful things. Hate, pettiness and cynicism is time consuming. It eats away not only at your soul, but at the very limited time you have on earth. Note for yourself what brings you joy and give them an extra few seconds when they come up to bask in them.

You only get so many of them.

But the nice thing is, beauty most often occurs naturally.

We are so amazingly good at manufacturing hate, pettiness and cynicism that it seems to be our current measure of worth. Our GBP (Gross Bile Product).

So I say unto thee, Get Off Thyne Ass And Smell Flowers.

Closing

Community is something humans have always done and have always sucked at. We've always been power hungry, violent, hateful, petty creatures capable of unspeakable acts. For any pretty good community I show you, you can easily show me an evil one that was more cohesive and more effective. I know that. You know that. And those bastards over there know that too.

Everyone knows that.

Perfection is unattainable, yet beauty is everywhere. Which would we rather strive for then? Perfection? Or the constant realization that we flawed, malevolent bags of flesh can, from time to time, be civil and enjoyable?

Perhaps our issue is that we see Community is an object, where it is actually a process.

21 September 2006

The always trusted New York Post says that You Tube won't sell for under 1.5 billion smackers. That's a lot of smackers. According the the CIA, that would make You Tube worth roughly French Guiana. Good luck, Mr Tube in your search for untold wealth. Thank you for showing me Monty Python / Star Trek mashups. That truly is worth 1.5 billion.

20 September 2006

I've been pretty quiet in the H.P. paranoia attack but I thought I'd speak up after the recent NY Times article outlining the extent to which H.P. considered or actually did go to find their leaks. What one can gather from this is a few things:

1. Some people at H.P. were very concerned about the legality of their efforts2. Some people at H.P. were very concerned about finding and punishing the person that leaked the information.3. Some people at H.P. were unconcerned about the legality of their efforts.

Recently, we've leaks and spying have been center stage in the US. In the past, spying on American citizens was illegal without going through certain channels. Those doing such spying invoked the oft-used quote of the oppressor "these are extraordinary times and it's for your own good."

Now we find that such activities funnel down to some of our most trusted corporations. Due to the general trust of Bill Hewlett, HP has enjoyed a stellar reputation as large corporations go. I'd imagine he's not sleeping too well these days.

It is always interesting to see what people commit to e-mail.

The NYT reports:

Concern over legality was reflected in an e-mail message sent on Jan. 30 by Mr. Hunsaker, the chief ethics officer, to Mr. Gentilucci, the manager of global investigations. Referring to a private detective in the Boston area, Ronald R. DeLia, whom the company had hired, he asked: “How does Ron get cell and home phone records? Is it all above board?”

Mr. Gentilucci responded that Mr. DeLia, the owner of Security Outsourcing Solutions, had investigators “call operators under some ruse.”

He also wrote: “I think it is on the edge, but above board. We use pretext interviews on a number of investigations to extract information and/or make covert purchases of stolen property, in a sense, all undercover operations.”

"I shouldn't have asked." From any ethics director, that's a pretty distressing statement. "Please suspend all activity with Mr. DeLia until I can review his methods," would have been preferable. Would have looked a lot better in the New York Times...

Clearly, this was a program that had gone out of control. I don't think that many (certainly some) people at HP were deliberately being evil. But also clearly this will damage their credibility.

From the standpoint of community, we see here that in large institutions actions gather inertia and can go awry in a very bad way. Whether it's a leak investigation at HP, covering up abuse at Wal*Mart or putting FEMA in an organization obsessed with foreign terrorists. In the beginning, each of these things may have seemed like a good idea - but groupthink gives them a purpose beyond reason to often disastrous results.

When we have a community - social, corporate, political, whatever - the members of that community need to be vigilant about the direction of the community. Compare that direction to what is legal, what is within the community mission, and how the action will be perceived by other communities.

HP is learning the hard way that their corporate community intersects with many other communities in not always comfortable ways.

That decision came because of a highly unlikely alliance between a
group of disabled activists in wheelchairs who came to Washington
trying to get themselves arrested at the White House gates -- and the
Bush administration aide who ended up listening to them.

The cooperation formed between the administration and the group was a
surprise to everyone involved. Not even the white house aide sent out
to "deal with" the protesting group. To his credit, listening to the
audio, one can hear the frustration and entrenchment of the group - a
group assembled fully expecting to leave disappointed - and the calm
responses of the white house aide. His main message (my words): "I
can't say what we're going to do for you, because we've been ignoring
you. But I'm not ignoring you now."
That kernel of honesty in their first encounter has led to some
interesting cooperation.

14 September 2006

I guess I don't understand what a Launch is. Techmeme is abuzz today about Microsoft "Launching" their iPod called Zune. But you can't buy one until the holidays and they won't tell you how much one will cost.

That's not really a Launch.

Social networking gets bounced around here too because Zune's have 802.11 built in and you can send music and video to someone nearby. It's highly DRMed - the recipient can only view it three times. If they don't view it three times within three days, it disappears anyway. That's called Social Networking by some. More accurately, it's temporary file sharing.

On the Passionate Blog, Kathy Sierra gave us a nice discussion about the differences between sexy, glossy, highly wordsmithed advertisements and brochures versus dull, lifeless and poorly written user manuals. It's an excellent post. At the heart of it, though, is respect.

Kathy says:

Let's put our money where our users are. If we're in it for the short term, then sure--it makes sense to do everything to get a new user, while doing as little as possible once we've got them. But if we're really in it for the long haul--for customer retention and loyal users--then shouldn't we be using all that graphic design and pro writing talent for the people we care about the most? Our users?

In it for the long haul. At my company, we've always tried to make user manuals that looked nice, had plenty of screen shots, and clearly laid out what to do and when. We wordsmith those documents as well as we do our proposals.

But I see this as transcending merely the world of user manuals. This is another example of corporate blindness in the face of community.

To go back to yesterday's example, NewsCorp says they want to crush FlickrYouTubeEtc. They are tired of people taking their attention and this is the attention economy. They do not care that you just spent three weeks uploading pictures into Flickr and tagging them. They do not care that you have an active community on YouTube.

But back to Kathy's point, they do not care about the long haul. In the long run, new applications will come up regularly and people will use them. Even if they stay on MySpace for life, there will always be applications external to MySpace that enhance the MySpace experience. If NewsCorp spends its time drastically cloning every popular application it sees, it will never allow the MySpace application to achieve its full potential.

They are focused on getting you to stay on NewsCorp servers for the next three hours, as opposed to creating an outwardly focused platform that gets you to stay there for an hour - every day for the rest of your life. That much attempted user control will alienate users and they will leave. NewsCorp will get their three hour stickiness - but users will migrate away from MySpace more quickly because they will feel controlled. MySpace will be less flexible.

The "F" in RTFM is the biggest clue that most of us blame the user for not reading the manual. But if "reducing guilt is the killer app", companies should take more responsibility for whether readers use their manuals. And since we can't force our users to do anything, if we want them to RTFM, we need to make a better FM.

The main point here is that manuals are afterthoughts. They are cumbersome. They are sometimes ugly.

This is how we are providing community in our social software. Kathy's point that producers are to blame when people can't use their stuff is vital. Sites like Gather stare blankly at their dismal usage statistics and wonder why people aren't showing up. MySpace watches their growth numbers start to sag and think they need to build YouTube. LinkedIn wonders why people won't pay for the service, but seem to use it when it is free.

Right now, social software is in its infancy. In fact, later we may look back and see this time as when social software was still an unfertilized egg. The reason is that no one is seeing social software as a layer. We see it as an application. Which is like calling OSX an application. Or the Internet an application. Social Software is not an application.

So, I hereby call for an end to the term "Social Software" and suggest we use the term "Social Layer." This social layer will provide a framework for collaboration, visualizations of networks, and secure personal information storage. Other applications (e-commerce, communications, conversation tools, etc.) are built upon this layer.

In the next few days, I'll discuss what a Social Layer might look like, what potential applications built on it might entail, and ways in which a social layer is infinitely preferable to the substandard "Social Software" we are currently saddled with.

13 September 2006

For months I've been tracking the divergence between legitimate corporate interests and the needs of on-line communities. Multichannel quotes Peter Chernin - CEO of NewsCorp - as saying that he is anxious to kill off Flickr, YouTube, and other Web 2.0ish applications that are apparently parasitically sucking traffic off MySpace.

Mr. Chernin showed his hubris when he said:

” Chernin said. “Given that most of their traffic comes from us, if we
build adequate, if not superior, competitors, I think we ought to be
able to match them, if not exceed them.”.

Peter should remember: NewsCorp bought, not built, MySpace. They have very little actual experience in building an on-line application from the ground up.

Peter should also know that he is jumping on a band wagon very late. There are thousands of groups out there building little on-line apps to do these things.

But mostly, Peter should understand that the strength of the web is the feelings of freedom you get by being able to select amongst a variety of components to get things done. The strength of the web is the antithesis of sticky - the polar opposite of brand loyalty - the essence of non-permanence.

Mr. Chernin believes that MySpace will still be a major player in 5 years. Poor Mr. Chernin.

I don't know what will displace MySpace, but it will be displaced. It's hard to imagine a world without MySpace, just like at one time it was hard to imagine a world without Ronald Reagan. But, you see, Mr. Chernin comes from a world of broadcast media - a world of (even on cable) a very limited playing field. Merely being on the field assured some sort of success.

He also comes from a world of corporate sensibility. Someone is leaving my place to go to a different place? Well, I'll have to control all the places then.

But, funny, this isn't even how commerce works. Have you ever noticed how some parts of town are the "Restaurant area" or the "Clothing store area" or the "Chinatown". This is because businesses in an urban setting tend to thrive when located near like businesses. The ease of choice allows people to go to an area and decide worry-free. They don't have to make a final decision of which restaurant to eat at until the last second. It's an urban design fact that has been true for centuries.

Even though there's this concentration of places to go, their diversity is what gives them strength. The differences in approaches that different creative teams give to their goods and services.

NewsCorp can certainly spend their money creating nice new Me-Too applications that will take marketshare from YouTube and Flickr and Penthouse.com, but I believe it highly unlikely that they will innovate. As I noted a few days ago, Me-Tooism is not well received by the easily bored Internet generation. Chernin will find that there is some magic delta between his Me-Too application and what he is copying wherein even innovation isn't enough to wow. The innovation needs to be useful and provide some new game to play.

If Chernin were smart, he would be surrounding himself with experts in game theory, computer gaming and social networking and building out from there. The applications will be secondary to the game - the game is what supports the community. The game is not an application. It is not photo sharing. It is not downloading music.

The game is something that captures the imagination of the users in the service of doing something useful and fun.

But corporations are not interested in either useful or fun, they are interested in attention. And companies like NewsCorp equate attention with the object's reception of attention, and not the subject's needs in the provision of that attention. You see, Corporations see attention as something they take - but people see attention as something they give. And it's personal.